J, the German Kurrent letter j

History

The letter J occupies the 10th position in the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a palatal approximant /j/, corresponding to the consonant sound of English 'yes' or German 'Jahr'.

Lowercase j in Kurrent is formed as an extension of the i stroke: it begins in the middle zone, plunges through the baseline into a deep descender loop that sweeps leftward and upward, and is topped with a dot. In classical Kurrent, capital J is written with the exact same glyph as capital I, with scribes relying on context to distinguish vowel from consonant.

The letter j is common in calendar dates ('Januar', 'Juni', 'Juli'), given names ('Johann', 'Josef', 'Jakob'), and temporal markers ('Jahr', 'jetzt'). Recognizing its descender loop distinguishes it from middle-zone vowels in cursive script.

German was slow to separate consonant J from vowel I, because the j sound itself never left the language; broken scripts did not tell the capitals I and J apart until about 1900.^[1] J is rare in German text: the 24th most frequent letter, at about 0.27% of all letters.^[2]